Official Radeon 7970 Review and discussion thread

[Roadhog]

Originally Posted by slaWter

Just to be fair...

It's a single 580, strangely modified to run 3 screens with only 1.5GB VRAM.
It's not a good comparison.

A fair comparison would be 7970 Crossfire vs GTX 580 3GB SLI when it comes to Eyefinity/Surround.

Yeah I know what it is. They should have done what you said or at least given the 7970 an 11% overclock too like the 580 had.

[K007]

Originally Posted by Kain

Notice that the GTX 580 was done at 5040 x 1050 while the HD 7970 was done at 5760 x 1200. The HD 7970 also had SSAO enabled (not sure what that is ).

i think ssao is some shadow thing..it has a huge impact on your performance so the 580 is with lower res and with this feature disabled...personally i dont really see whats so good about all these ssao stuff...it doesn't look that great to me tbh..

[Bman212121]

Originally Posted by Redeemed

That is an application of VMs I'd never considered. Is that even possible? With the API's dealing with the drivers and such? I think it'd be rather neat.

It is actually already possible with Virtualbox. You got me thinking about it and I was able to make it happen. So if you have 2 guest VM's you can isolate the mouse to that VM. The only problem is there is an overhead penalty and the mouse is not as smooth as it would be natively. Basically to do this directly on your pc you would need to have another stack to intercept mouse and keyboard input like what they are doing for audio. Then run a second instance of the mouse pointer only on that display. It seems very plausable to do, the main thing is I don't know how WDDM handles full screen support on these new cards. You always used to have to specify which display was primary and anytime you wanted a full screen application it would switch to that monitor. If you can get around that we're pretty close to making it a reality.


@everyone above:
For the 7970 I didn't even really mean versus the GTX 580, just the fact that a single card is able to push 3 1080p panels at almost max settings and still be playable. With a 10% OC you wouldn't need to do much to make it completely smooth. If you're looking for a better comparison between cards there is a graph at the bottom of the page to show all of the cards at the same settings.

Originally Posted by brady

I agree that it's pretty niche, and I think if you don't care enough about it, then AMD offers some amazing products in terms of price/performance/power consumption. I'd actually prefer GPU accelerated PhysX be platform independent; I think it's annoying that it's not.

There are good and bad things about GPU acceleration. For games it makes more sense to have physics on the CPU because there is a lot more free processing power. I already have a quad core cpu with half of the cores waiting to be used, but my GPU tends to have it's hands full. For particle effects and things like that GPU physics can do some interesting looking things, but my main reasoning for not worrying about phsyX is that it isn't integral in making something work.

What I mean is all of the stuff I've seen for PhsyX has been more about adding additional particles when you break a block versus things like aerodynamics. It doesn't matter to me if using GPU physics gives me more stuff on the screen when I blow something up, but it would matter more if I were playing a game like Iracing and using PhsyX on the GPU meant they could produce more accurate driving conditions with the additional GPU power. You can use PhysX on the CPU, but I'm not really sure what type of things it can handle.

That's probably the biggest thing for me is I don't know of a PhsyX enabled game that adds real functionality by having it on, it's mainly just there to increase looks. In BF3 using their physics engine it's now possible to actually blow things up and drive a tank through those blasted light poles! If using Nvidia PhysX meant I could drive though a light pole versus not, I would be all over it. Like you said though, if PhysX would work on any GPU and not just be used on the cpu for other cards, there might be more draw to using it. As an Nvidia GPU only feature I don't think it's going to get those types of differentiators to really make it that must have feature.

[Ninja Prime]

Originally Posted by i SPY

Same by 7970 with 32 vs 6970 32 heh.. they need moooar ROPs, 40-48 would be ideal for 7970.

I donno, anandtech did this benchmark to test ROP throughput and 7970 is around 51% better than 6970, so maybe its work smarter not harder?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/26

It even beats the pants off the GTX 580 which has 48 ROPs.

[Muppet]

Originally Posted by Ninja Prime

I donno, anandtech did this benchmark to test ROP throughput and 7970 is around 51% better than 6970, so maybe its work smarter not harder?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...7970-review/26

It even beats the pants off the GTX 580 which has 48 ROPs.

There's no denying this card is a big step up from the 6970. Tessellation performance alone is worth the upgrade.

[Johnny C]

Originally Posted by slaWter

Just to be fair...

It's a single 580, strangely modified to run 3 screens with only 1.5GB VRAM.
It's not a good comparison.

A fair comparison would be 7970 Crossfire vs GTX 580 3GB SLI when it comes to Eyefinity/Surround.

The card is drastically overclocked, but I agree with the vram limitation...2gb is a must for multidisplay

http://www.galaxytechus.com/usa/newsview.aspx?id=149

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Johnny C

The card is drastically overclocked, but I agree with the vram limitation...2gb is a must for multidisplay

http://www.galaxytechus.com/usa/newsview.aspx?id=149

If you want to never run out of VRAM at playable settings 3Gb is necessary. The only difference between 1.5 and 2GB is 2GB runs out less than 1.5.

For 1080P surround at 4XAA, 1.5 is enough 97% + of the time.

[Bman212121]

Ask and you shall receive:

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/review...lefield-3.html

I'm sure they have room for FXAA to be turned on, and it would still be fully playable!


If you're doing comparisons you'll have to take note they seem to just turn every setting on max and see what happens. This seems to affect the GTX 580 SLI in F1 and the Batman tests.

[i SPY]

Guru3d OC test

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...erclock-guide/

[K007]

Originally Posted by i SPY

Guru3d OC test

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...erclock-guide/

I'm not going to make this conclusion any longer then needed, the Radeon HD 7970 is impressive at many fronts however we never expected the overclocking potential to be this good. It results in even faster performance while the surrounding conditions like TDP, heat and noise remain absolutely under control. That's free extra performance, at very little extra risk or annoyances.

O/C looks good , i think we should see a sapphier vaporx style with a pretty insane o/c added

[shadow001]

Well, i ordered 3 of the new samsung SyncMaster LS27A850DS 27IN Widescreen LCD's that support 2560*1440 resolution, wich uses their PLS display tech wich is comparable to e-IPS panels for image quality, color accuracy, viewing angles and backlight bleed, and uses LED backlighting rather than CCFL, like the Dell U2711.


Each cost me 849$ so cheap they are not(2600$ total with shipping and insurance), and as a final hail to what 3 GTX580's in triple SLI, water cooled can really do, i intend to push them to the limit, benchmarking games at 7680*1440 resolution at the highest possible quality settings while aiming for 60 Fps average results....


Keep in mind my cards are running at 950 Mhz clocks, so not the garden variety air cooled super clocked editions running at 850 Mhz here, so it's pretty much the best case scenario barring hitting memory limitations as they are 1.5 GB versions, wich i expect to see once i crank on the AA on top of that insane resolution anyhow...


This is not just for information for general purposes in this forum, but also to set a baseline for myself once the GTX580's are replaced and i perform the same acid test on the new cards too, and see the differences and how large they are....I've had enough of benchmarking with monitors that "only" do 1920*1080 thanks(even if it's 3 of them), so it's time to crank that up a couple of notches....

[i SPY]

And its cooler compared to 40nm


7970 Thermal test
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/848-...nfrarouge.html






Now if it were 1125mhz by default then it would own really bad

But still 200mhz OC with default voltage is amazing imo.